I have found Exercitium 5 Cap XXXVIII in LLPSI Pars II confusing in parts. Now I recall from Book 1 of LLPSI about indirect speech and subjunctive tense. Accusative + infinitive and where an 'ut' clause is used then ut + subjunctive. But I'm unclear about some of what follows.

My problem may be partly due to the fact that Orberg uses single quotation marks for a reported event: something which in English is never done. In other words.

John said that he saw the man on the street

would in Orberg's style be

John said that 'he saw the man on the street'.

I don't know whether this is a continental / Scandinavian thing because I've never seen this in English. I guess I find this distracting.

In any case, here's the exercise and the correct answers. I'll give my own view as to what's going on with the choice of tenses and persons but I'd be grateful for any pointers from the learned members of Textkit. I provide (Orberg's) correct answers in square brackets [ ].

Well, ok, but I don't know how I was supposed to guess 'coepi'. Why would I assume Nero would speak in the perfect tense. I would have put 'coepio' and had him speak in the present and I would have had 'coepere' and not 'coepisse'.

Which begs the question: what's the relationship between the second sentence in Orberg's exercise and the first? Do I assume it must be 'coepi' because the next sentence begins 'Nero dixit'?

OK...the persent infinitive 'timere' agrees with the tense of 'Timeo'. Also 'Danaos a se timeri'? seems to beg a nominative 'Danai' until I remember that it's reported speech so it's accusative. 'Se' here is presumably ablative and 'timeri' is present infinitive passive.

This is where I get lost. First off. Why is the reported speech 'ubi esset....' not in the infinitive like all the other examples? Why not: Aeneas interrogavit 'Ubi fuisse uxorem suam? Cur se non secuta esse.'

Instead the entire solution is simply to convert it to imperfect subjunctive. Why?

Well, ok, but I don't know how I was supposed to guess 'coepi'. Why would I assume Nero would speak in the perfect tense. I would have put 'coepio' and had him speak in the present and I would have had 'coepere' and not 'coepisse'.

Coepi is a defective verb, like odi for example, and has no present forms of its own -- it only appears in the perfect system. To express the same meaning in the present, you must default to incipio, incipere instead.

This is where I get lost. First off. Why is the reported speech 'ubi esset....' not in the infinitive like all the other examples? Why not: Aeneas interrogavit 'Ubi fuisse uxorem suam? Cur se non secuta esse.'

Instead the entire solution is simply to convert it to imperfect subjunctive. Why?

The original sentence is not subjunctive and I can't figure out why it becomes subjunctive when it's reported but wihtout the 'ut' clause.

As a distinct category under indirect discourse, indirect questions put the verb into the subjunctive by default (barring a few exceptions). There is a short little summary here from the University of Pennsylvania that might be helpful if your text doesn't cover it: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~struck/classe ... stion.html